Five wrote:Nice, though I personally don't like metaplotting in shared worlds. It's a great tool to keep a setting from stagnating, but metaplots, especially epic ones like that (as well as the nature of the Dark Powers), should be largely left a DM tool. As with anything in published books it easy to ignore, change, or otherwise work around such things, but it can make it a hard(er) sell for DMs who want to push their own ideas and metaplots to their players, especially new ones to the table that are coming in with preconceived notions of the setting about to be played.
Not a dealbreaker by any means, just a sometimes nuisance that doesn't really have to be.
I wouldn't see recreating the world after massive events (as in the Red Box) as making DM creativity harder,you just have more tools and ideas to crete what you want. If it wasn't like that why would we need shared world settings for? You can just have the rules and you can make whatever you want.
Having a base set of rules and the creative freedom to apply those rules, and sharing/comparing stories and ideas with other players/tables on sites like this is all I want in a rpg.
When the publisher's hand comes and uses all of the "god tools" they teasingly provided in that setting for the gamers to ponder and leapfrog off of (DPs, ToUD, etc) then it's sometimes annoying and a little bit insulting. "Here's a great puzzle for you to figure out, but let me do it for you." I'm not big on spectating when it comes to D&D. Provide us the rules, and give us a start point for our imaginations. We'll do the rest. If I'm stuck, I'll get ideas from people like you and eventually I'll get unstuck, one way or another.
Less definition and more imagination-inspiring potentials. That's all I want in a D&D game anyway.
What about the Grand Conjuction? Wasn't that an official apocalyptic event that refreshed the setting? For me it was and it happened only 4 real world 1 years from the beginning of the setting. Or the Grim Harvest that happened 2 real world 1 years after the Red Box. Now after real world 15 years after the last mega event in the setting I don't see why not officially rearranging everything in the setting in a continuation. At least it would be better than just have a parallel Universe Ravenloft with the old one.
And I agree that to just have a conversion of the setting into the new rules is just boring and unnecessary and a lack of creativity and though I don't have all seven re-editions and conversions of Ravenloft I6 I agree that to have another one is a waste of resources and time.
"I am not omniscient, but I know a lot."
-Mephistopheles from Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Mephisto wrote:
What about the Grand Conjuction? Wasn't that an official apocalyptic event that refreshed the setting? For me it was and it happened only 4 real time years from the beginning of the setting. Or the Grim Harvest that happened 2 real time years after the Red Box. Now after 15 years after the last mega event in the setting I don't see why not officially rearranging everything in the setting in a continuation. At least it would be better than just have a parallel Universe Ravenloft with the old one.
I never liked those inclusions either. Haha For the exact same reasons. Plus, the idea of Azalin figuring out the fabric of existence just left a bland taste in my mouth. It's just too much of a pedestal push. And it seemed thematically out of place. Very high fantasy. Not my vision of Ravenloft. Seemed more...Realmsian. Which we walked away from. Beyond that is seemed more like watching somebody else's group play out a module. Or, taking the results of one group's ending of a module and putting it to print. Cool, but meh.
Setting changes such as offering up Ravenloft as a self-contained world (versus Weekend in Hell RL) was enough of a change for me.
"A very piteous thing it was to see such a quantity of dead bodies, and such an outpouring of blood - that is, if they had not been enemies of the Christian faith."
- Jean Pierre Sarrasin, "The Memoirs of the Lord of Joinville"
Having this year's Quoth the Raven focus on the Time of Unparalleled Darkness might be fun. Adventures and stories set during a vague"event" where the world is unravelling before heroes manage to save it, recreating the world while also rolling back time.
Jester of the FoS wrote:Having this year's Quoth the Raven focus on the Time of Unparalleled Darkness might be fun. Adventures and stories set during a vague"event" where the world is unravelling before heroes manage to save it, recreating the world while also rolling back time.
As I said earlier, a Crisis on Infinite Domains.
Especially since the Horseman of Pestilence has already arrived...
Just plunging in blind here and leaving my thoughts on the whole matter...
Firstly, I'm glad to see Ravenloft finally get something more for 5e than just the inevitable I6 retread. I may have my problems with the setting, but I still want to see it get some love.
Secondly, I ironically find myself torn on how I feel about the revealed changes. I've always had my problems with Ravenloft "canon", since my taste in Dark Fantasy is far more Castlevania or Bloodborne and far less Call of Cthulhu or Polish Warhammer Fantasy, but I still feel that the Ravenloft setting deserves respect and, frankly, these teasers do not suggest all that much respect for what has come before. I'm not inherently opposed to some of the ideas suggested - Saidra kind of makes me think of a Darklord version of American McGee's Alice, which is kind of a fun mental image and it's not like the Shadow Rift or Tepest ever really played up that dark fairy tale angle much - but... well, I suppose a large part of it is cynicism; the last couple of years have ground me down to the point that gender-flipping the Frankenstein expies and replacing Dominic, whose entire schtick was "mind-controlling master manipulator who lusts after women but can't get them because of his curse", feels rooted less in the author's having interesting ideas and more in them trying to squeeze extra emotional coinage from the public at large... although it is kind of hilarious that they decided to swap Valachan's Darklord from "Blackula" to "cannibal (presumably not!African) huntress".
Thirdly, for the new lineages, I'm legitimately impressed: this is the first edition where dhampirs have actually been an official Ravenloft PC race, despite the fact you'd think they were tailormade for the setting! Seriously, what was TSR smoking that they decided "half-vistani" was a better flagship race for Ravenloft? I love the basic idea of the Hexenblood, because I really like 3e's Hagspawn and Pathfinder's Changelings, so a hag-based race makes a lot of sense for Ravenloft. The "Reborn" as a stand-in for Revenants or the old Grim Harvest(?) rules for playing an undead PC work, but frankly I find it kind of underwhelming with just how vanilla it seems to be. My biggest disappointment is that these are the only new races; as my own abortive attempt to produce a Demihumans of Dark Fantasy article for QTR shows, there's a lot of potential for a less humanocentric approach to a Dark Fantasy setting, and in particularly I'm really depressed about the lack of love for an official Caliban race in 5e.
Finally, I'm not impressed with the subclasses: only two? Seriously? Ravenloft has room for so much more, and this just feels lazy. Hell, even I can think of at least a couple of subclasses: Domains for the Church of Ezra, Paladins inspired by the Lamplighters of Mordent, Warlocks of the Fury who serve whatever dark power in the Mist scourges the wicked, Hallowed Witches as a Druid or maybe Wizard subclass, even the return of the Necromancer-Diviner hybrid the Arcanist, only this time not being rendered unplayable by the very rules of the setting. Furthermore, I don't understand what the College of Spirits is really trying to be - is it the Dirgist (necromancer bard)? Is it something else? And why an Undead Patron Warlock; didn't we literally have that already in the SCAG's Undying Patron?
All in all, I'll buy the book, largely because I can't bring myself not to show WotC that people do want setting books instead of just more adventures, but I'm not going in with high hopes.
"Is there any word more meaningless than 'hope'? Besides 'blarfurgsnarg,' of course."
"Seek and Locate! Locate and Destroy! Destroy and Rejoice!"
I'm cautiously optimistic, and am hoping that even if I absolutely hate what they've done with the setting there's some good rules and game mechanics in there, and at the very least it will get people interested in the setting enough that old school DM's can say "here, try this out" and run a 5e Ravenloft campaign using the old continuity, just like handing them a George Calin CD or something else from before their time that you think might be too good for them to miss out on. And fortunately we have our own community putting out new material and QTR, and if the official version turns out to be a complete reboot, maybe we can start having an official FoS timeline that starts moving forward again.
Something that hasn't been mentioned about the the guidelines for making players more comfortable and the x cards and such, that I think is worth mentioning, is that the target audience for the original Ravenloft module and the original black box (of which I am one of) grew up in one of the most stress free time periods in our nation's history, with 25 years or so with no real major wars or upheavals. You had a couple of scary after school movies about the threat of nuclear war (which is diminished but still present now), but not the hiding under your desk missile drills and threat of getting drafted into a deadly war that my parents had, and not the active shooter drills at school, 20 non stop years of war, and things like 9/11 and the pandemic that the target audience for this upcoming book has lived through, so the likelihood of the average new player now having an adverse reaction to certain subjects is much greater than it was for people my age in 1990 (I crap talk the younger generations a lot but I won't deny they got hosed in a couple big ways), so having those kind of guidelines in the beginning of a horror themed game that might be the first one they ever play doesn't seem so unreasonable. Even if they throw 5-10 pages at it, I'm not bothered. Just one of many prices of getting older is I'm no longer the target audience for things I liked.
When it comes to the setting though, I would rather they have a short section at the beginning of each domain to say 'hey this deals with folklore and imagery pertaining to a particular culture, so try to keep that in mind and play with it respectfully' or 'this domain deals a lot in themes of brutality and human cruelty, so be sure that everyone at the table is on the same page about being okay with it' instead of just watering everything down and ditching all the continuity (which may not turn out to be the case as the book hasn't come out yet). There wasn't a lot in there back then that's more objectional than what's in the average horror property today. It's definitely not Revenge of the Nerds level cringy to look back on, and the elements that are problems are ones that could be easily omitted, as usually it was a minor character or story point, and even it it was an entire darklord (Von Kharkov is the only core DL that I would think could even need that) then it's easy to kill them off and replace them, especially in a setting like Ravenloft where reality itself is constantly changing and things like the Grand Conjunction happen. Hell some of the most cringy stuff has to do with Strahd and they kept that untouched (or from a couple of CoS reviews I've read it seems they actually doubled down on it) just because everybody likes Strahd.
I think it's good that things continually get more progressive with each generation, so long as there's competence involved, and after reading through the articles and interviews about the new book, my biggest worry is that the way they were talking about it reminded me so much of the way the people at Marvel responsible for things like the clone saga and brand new day talked about what they had in store for the readers. Drastic change just to 'shake things up' and relieve writers of the need to tell a competent story to sell books, or "I don't like that Peter Parker is married so I'm going to undo the last couple decades of continuity so I get what I want without having to put effort in having the change I want to make be motivated in the story". And while I don't ever say things like 'they raped my childhood', because my childhood is fine and I still have the old stuff to go back and read/watch/play if I want to, I will say those kind of things are pissing down the back of longtime fans and telling them it's raining.
Something that has all the same elements of Get Out but not done by someone as good as Jordan Peele could have been a total cringefest, and I worry that even though they're trying to be progressive and not bother anyone, they could do it so badly that they cause as many problems as they fix. "Hey what if we had the elves and halflings and all our favorite fantasy races doing all the fortune telling stuff the duskier skinned people do" sounds like something that could age at the speed of light, and 'yeah but now they actually need the darklord around to help with the zombies' has one leg firmly planted in 'white savior' and another in 'Stockholm syndrome'. A crafty darklord could definitely gaslight them into thinking otherwise, but their populace should always be better off without them than with. Someone like Strahd isn't trapped in there with his subjects, they're trapped in there with him, and while it could be just the case of someone who misspoke in an interview, it struck me as someone failing to grasp the subject matter and completely missing the forest for the trees. Hoping I'm wrong on that.
I really liked Mephisto's post and hope that's what it turns out to be, that it's just a decades long time jump using some of the ToUD stuff as a jumping off point to change the things they wanted to change. In any case I'm really looking forward to seeing what they came up with.
Thanks to everyone who actually made it this far. I wasn't expecting to write so much when I started.
In case people missed it, no more Core. Only islands in the mists ("In this new interpretation, every domain is a lonely island drifting through the mists.").
"A full set of (game) rules is so massively complicated that the only time they were all bound together in a single volume, they underwent gravitational collapse and became a black hole" (Adams)
Joël of the FoS wrote:In case people missed it, no more Core. Only islands in the mists ("In this new interpretation, every domain is a lonely island drifting through the mists.").
Bit of a letdown, but not surprised. At the same time, as anybody from the Black Box era knows it's not necessarily a write-off. Look at Ravenloft's journey from there to here. Absolute worst case is that 5E Ravenloft is a mess and needs all of you to dismantle it and rummage through the scrap to build it back up into something bigger and stronger for the 5E gen. Mordenheim-style. Best-case we get more heads on our shelves to throw ideas around with.
I'm still in because I've been here before (this will be what, the fourth time?) and I still want to see and witness this new rebirth. And I don't fear the shadows up ahead. haha In fact, I'm a bit excited at the thought of looking ahead at it all going full circle, from now to the new old, and from the new old back into a new old Core...we all know it can't not happen, right?
I heard once from somewhere: "The harder you try to hold something in your arms, the quicker it dies."
Yeah. Have at it. Let's see what you got..
"A very piteous thing it was to see such a quantity of dead bodies, and such an outpouring of blood - that is, if they had not been enemies of the Christian faith."
- Jean Pierre Sarrasin, "The Memoirs of the Lord of Joinville"
Joël of the FoS wrote:In case people missed it, no more Core. Only islands in the mists ("In this new interpretation, every domain is a lonely island drifting through the mists.").
Seems like an odd choice for a campaign setting. Now I'm even more curious what it's going to look like. I figured if they were going that way they would have just went with "here's a book full of different ideas for 'weekend in hell' getaways from your normal campaign" and maybe add a few new rules for horror and stuff and the DMing guidelines and leave it at that. I guess that could still be what it is, but it sounded like they put a lot into new rules for PC building and unless the domains are much bigger than before, or less one note, players might get tired of being stuck in Transylvania or fairy tale Europe, or Zombicide after a while. I know there are players who like campaigns that entirely take place in a single city and locale and really sink their teeth into it but you would think they'd be casting a wider net for a 250 page book release. Maybe getting around between island in the mist domains is easier now so that parties don't need a Vistani favor to do it.
Joël of the FoS wrote:In case people missed it, no more Core. Only islands in the mists ("In this new interpretation, every domain is a lonely island drifting through the mists.").
That makes it seem more likely to me that they might provide something along the lines of individual maps of the domains. But therein lies another interesting question. Do we get CoS Barovia as-written? Or will a potential map in VR's Guide also show Teufeldorf, Zeidenberg, and Immol? (Might as well add Orasnou since it gets no love and it's practically canon if not canon.)
Joël of the FoS wrote:In case people missed it, no more Core. Only islands in the mists ("In this new interpretation, every domain is a lonely island drifting through the mists.").
So no new map of the Core
Really disappointed so far...
So I guess the Sea of Sorrows will be like Saragoss... and there is a chance there is no Nocturnal Sea.
And what about the islands in these two seas?
"I am not omniscient, but I know a lot."
-Mephistopheles from Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Joël of the FoS wrote:In case people missed it, no more Core. Only islands in the mists ("In this new interpretation, every domain is a lonely island drifting through the mists.").
That makes it seem more likely to me that they might provide something along the lines of individual maps of the domains. But therein lies another interesting question. Do we get CoS Barovia as-written? Or will a potential map in VR's Guide also show Teufeldorf, Zeidenberg, and Immol? (Might as well add Orasnou since it gets no love and it's practically canon if not canon.)
— onmyoji
I don't think there are going to be any maps of cities just domain maps, similar to Domains of Dread or better Ravenloft Player's Guide Islands of Terror.
"I am not omniscient, but I know a lot."
-Mephistopheles from Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Mephisto wrote:
I don't think there are going to be any maps of cities just domain maps, similar to Domains of Dread or better Ravenloft Player's Guide Islands of Terror.
A little bit of cartography of cities that hadn’t been canonically mapped before would have been a good reason for an old grognard to buy the book. The reasons seem to be getting fewer and fewer. Could full color art be worth the sticker price?
Mephisto wrote:I don't think there are going to be any maps of cities just domain maps, similar to Domains of Dread or better Ravenloft Player's Guide Islands of Terror.
Oh I don't either. I'm wondering if we'll get an updated map of the domain of Barovia that will include Zeidenberg, Teufeldorf, and Immol (and possibly Orasnou), or if WotC will continue to pretend they don't exist like in CoS.
Mephisto wrote:I don't think there are going to be any maps of cities just domain maps, similar to Domains of Dread or better Ravenloft Player's Guide Islands of Terror.
Oh I don't either. I'm wondering if we'll get an updated map of the domain of Barovia that will include Zeidenberg, Teufeldorf, and Immol (and possibly Orasnou), or if WotC will continue to pretend they don't exist like in CoS.
— onmyoji
If Gundarak never existed there’s no Zeidenburg or Teufeldorf or discontent Gundarakite ethnicity to absorb.
